All Its Charms

by Keetje Kuipers

A luminous new collection from Keetje Kuipers, All Its Charms is a fearless and transformative reckoning of identity. By turns tender and raw, these poems chronicle Kuipers’ decision to become a single mother by choice, her marriage to the woman she first fell in love with more than a decade before giving birth to her daughter, and her family’s struggle to bring another child into their lives. All Its Charms is about much more than the reinvention of the American family―it’s about transformation, desire, and who we can become when we move past who we thought we would be.


We drive home from the lake, sand in our shoes,

the dart of fish faint at our ankles, each
shuttered BBQ shack a kudzu flash

in my side mirror. Pleasure has become
the itch of a mosquito bite between

my shoulders, and your rough thumb on my thigh
a tickle gentle as turtles bobbing

in Sea-Doo oil slick and cellophane scraps.
How many years did I suffer the loves

that gave too much freedom and not enough
tenderness? Let me be like the man we

saw outside of Notasulga, hands cuffed
behind his back, cigarette in his mouth,

and you be the sheriff, leaning in close,
cupping the sweet flame to my waiting face.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT

112 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 23, 2019

About the author

Keetje Kuipers is the author of four collections of poetry, all from BOA Editions: Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), winner of the Isabella Gardner Award; All Its Charms (2019), which includes poems honored by publication in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies; The Keys to the Jail (2014); and Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, Yale Review, and Poetry, among others. Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, an NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of multiple residency fellowships, including PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is currently Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at universities and conferences around the world, including at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her home is in Missoula, Montana, on the land of the Salish and Kalispel peoples and directly at the foot of the Rattlesnake Wilderness Area. She lives there with her wife and their two children, where she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being and keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.

Reviews

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t think of another poet writing with this much tenderness and roughness combined, that can thread these two poles of the natural together quite so.

[Martin Ott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Welcome to personal poems that packs a punch, line to line, chronicling the author’s transformation into motherhood and rekindled love in verse that leaves you swaying with cascading images. https://thepoetryquestion.com/2019/11...

[Kayla - the.bookish.mama · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished this one and I can confidently say it is one of my all time favorite poetry books. I wish that everyone would read this collection. I felt seen as a mom, as a woman, and as a human. It’s so beautiful and the way that she create images from small moments really is a testament that being a great poet is more than just the words you write, but in the way that you notice the world around you. This book makes me want to examine everythi maybe try to write about it. The images she creates make you not only see what is being described, but feel it too.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m glad I read these poems. Her lyricism with words was wonderful. The rhythms and the sounds in my mouth as I read them aloud, challenge me to use language in this way when I speak. It helps the reader focus the mind. She writes about being a mother…about love…about family. She makes one pay attention to where meaning is in each of our lives. I like this collection.

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm amazed by the way these poems, mostly brief, manage to convey such intimacy and emotional complexity in such small spaces. Every word feels just right, and at the same time the poems have an ease to them, a sense of seamlessness. They are beautiful, too, and moving, and clear-eyed and uncompromising as well as tender.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a group of formally beautiful, restrained lyrical poems about being in the middle of life’s journey, IVF, birthing a child, breastfeeding, reconciling one’s self to the loss of youth and freedom, and seizing the compensating joys of motherhood and marriage, all enriched by a poet’s awareness of the little miracles that energize a life. Kuipers has a keen eye for the depth of instants that go unnoticed and an ability to transform them, in startling metaphor and language, into something that pierces the surface of things, along with our hearts.
Each of these poems is a little masterpiece with a beginning, a middle, and an end, starting with some small moment of life or detail of the natural world brought into focus, plumbed for meaning, and then exploding into insight, ecstasy, or a kind of reconciliation. I learned so much from the pacing and structure of these poems; you can tell they have been constructed with love and care.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really adored this book, and the way it explores and embodies the intersection of grief and gratitude, this paradoxical landscape we all inhabit here in the 21st century as we live our lives with our loved ones, while witnessing and being complicit in the ruin of the earth.

[Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes poetry puts me off but this one was very approachable. From becoming a single mother to finding new love with another woman and trying to have another child, these poems offer a personal insight to her life.

[Martha Silano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kuiper's poems make me want to pay closer attention to the natural world. They also dare me to take more risks, be truer to myself, to run through a field of wildflowers, thankful to be alive. Just a few lines of her gorgeous work will have you hooked:

"Untouched? No such thing. Razed, plowed under, laid
to rest only to have soil peel back from the jaw bone.

What hasn't been populated by trespassers, remade from
the inside out? No wonder my body is finally doing the dirty

work it's always wanted to, spiraling deep within itself to make
from this wildness something that doesn't care if it belongs." ("Native Species," from "All Its Charms")

Kuipers adds a powerful, necessary voice to contemporary poetry.

[Hannah Notess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yesssssssssss

[Terresa Wellborn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful.

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

How do I happen upon a poet or a collection, I no longer remember. This collection considers motherhood in a lovely way, and some of the poems, umph.

[Kelsey]

Enjoyed most of these poems, but sometimes wished for a little less control: I would love to see the speaker really let loose and be a little weirder.

[Alyse Knorr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving, thoughtful, tender poems about queer family-making and family-raising. Socially conscious and regionally inflected, with beautiful images and resonant metaphors.

[Liz Fisher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning, raw, and so real. This collection of poetry touched me, felt transformative and inspiring. "On the Haunted Hayride with Audrey" brought tears to my eyes.

[Briar-Rose Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Her best poetry collection yet!

[Marla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2025

[Chase! · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in All its Charms interrogate the complexities of the self, from within as well as in the process of encountering and experiencing the world (and other selves) outside of it.